Fintech Yapily raises $5.4M for Open Banking API

Yapily is the London-based fintech startup offering an Open Banking-based API platform, enabling financial services providers and other kinds of enterprises, like merchants, to connect to banks. In its seed funding the startup recently raised $5.4 million.

The round was led by HV Holtzbrinck Ventures and LocalGlobe. Other investors include Taavet Hinrikus (TransferWise chairman and co-founder), Ott Kaukver (Twillio’s CTO) and Roberto Nicastro (UniCredit’s former deputy CEO).

Yapily will use this seed round to expand the company’s tech team and further develop the platform, alongside building out a sales team to respond to demand for Open Banking.

Stefano Vaccino, an ex-Goldman Sachs employee, founded the company in 2017. The company aims to grasp the opportunity of Open Banking and let various service providers to connect to banks more easily. The platform provides a way to make payments retrieve financial data through a “single secure API” that then connects to each supported bank’s open API.

“For a service provider that wants to benefit from [Open Banking], the technical barriers to integrating with hundreds or thousands of banks are very high” says Vaccino. With this in mind, Yapily’s mission is to enable service providers to connect to all banks, via one single API.

“We manage the upfront integrations and the ongoing maintenance of these connections,” he says, thus removing the technical obstacle for companies that want to benefit from “the Open Banking revolution.”

Yapily is positioning itself as a pure technology enabler, like cloud providers. “Our objective is to offer all the tools that an enterprise will need to manage this connectivity layer easily,” adds Vaccino.

Today, the Yapily API supports 35 of the biggest banks in Europe; that’s 250 million bank accounts, the startup says.